UC Berkeley Journalism - Program

The goal of the Graduate School of Journalism is to produce professional print, broadcast, and new media journalists who move on to positions of leadership and influence. The two-year Master of Journalism (M.J.) program provides intensive training in journalism skills and teaches the traditions and principles of the field.

In Urban Reporting: Courses Faculty Events

Urban Reporting

The urban affairs beat was once the domain of the country's most thoughtful and distinguished writers and broadcasters. We want to educate the specialists who will restore the beat's prominence and improve reporting on the complex issues that define the urban experience in the 21st century.

Our location at the center of the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area provides the I. Donald Terner Center on Urban Reporting a perfect laboratory for covering the extremes of wealth and poverty in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse geographic regions in the United States. We offer advanced reporting courses on cities across the country, such as The San Francisco Bureau or the radio production course "Inside Oakland," which allow students to explore different aspects of the urban and suburban terrain.

"For the first time in human history, more people now live in cities than outside them. And by the middle of this century, by some estimates, two of three humans will call a city home—in most cases a metropolis that is as overcrowded as it is underplanned. From Los Angeles to Delhi, writing and reporting on the life of cities has become one of the most dynamic and important beats imaginable—and yet media outlets, professional journalists and students struggle to figure out a way to make this transformation compelling to readers. Teaching Urban Reporting at the Journalism School has allowed me, along with groups of bright and unusually engaged students, to explore a variety of strategies for bringing the topic to life, whether the goal is clarifying the politically and emotionally fraught rebuilding process at Ground Zero, making sense of the just-add-water cities springing up in China and elsewhere, parsing housing policy or simply reviewing a new museum by a well-known architect."

Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic, The Los Angeles Times

Through the Terner Program for Urban Reporting, we are able to offer interdisciplinary courses in collaboration with the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning. These courses, usually offered in spring semester, introduce students to the city planners, real estate developers and architects who are changing the face of today's cities. Guests have included Washington Post reporter and author Joel Garreau and New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger.